Posted on 01/15/2009 8:51:11 PM PST by Coleus
For Quadir Askew, having girls in his sixth-grade class at Hawthorne Avenue School in Newark was just "drama" all the time. "Now it's real easy to concentrate with all boys," said the 12-year-old. "We don't have a lot of distractions and we get good grades."
Hawthorne is one of only a handful of schools in New Jersey to have same-sex classes. Though prohibited by state and federal sex discrimination laws, a provision in the federal No Child Left Behind act gives public schools the flexibility to implement such programs as they try to improve academic performance.
"We were failing and dealing with boys and girls who weren't focused on academics," said principal LaShawn Gibson-Burney. "We had to try something different, something out of the box." The experiment started last year at the K-8 school when students in grades six to eight were separated by gender and assigned to all-boy and all-girl classes.
Parents and guardians were asked to sign permission slips allowing officials to place the roughly 150 middle-school students in same-sex classes. A handful of parents objected, but Gibson-Burney convinced them to give the program a chance. Next she and her staff planned out the best way to do it. The third floor of the building was declared the math and science wing and literacy and social studies classes are held on the second floor. Boys and girls use separate stairwells when it's time to rotate between floors and sit on opposite sides of the cafeteria during lunch.
The only time they mix and mingle during the school day is recess. Seventh-grader Zhane Daughtridge occasionally misses her male counterparts but is enjoying boy-free classes. "Life is not all about boys," she said during a recent language arts lesson. "I get more work done now
(Excerpt) Read more at nj.com ...
All by themselves, boys listen to an assembly last month.
Hawthorne is one of only a few schools in the state to
have classes divided by gender.
Well, how about that!! My goat could figure that out without a masters degree.
well, hell, why not?
S”Same sex” for everything else nowadays.
As Rome is burning.....
Those aren’t boys. They are young men, and they appear to know it.
Could have fooled me. Looks like parochial schools used to be! LOL!
So whoever gets bad grades is gay! Right?
I kid, I kid...but good for the school district and good for those kids.
There was some black school in Miami that was doing this with great results until the Feds shut it down. I think this was back in Janet Reno’s time.
it figures. why would any democrat want blacks to succeed? the democrats will always need a base of people who need government to survive.
first slavery, then segregation then the KKK, all democrats, the democrats finally figured out they need their votes to get elected so now the minorities are in a sort of institutional slavery. Nothing changes.
But same sex schools are a great idea and better than coed schools without a doubt. This is a positive and hopeful story.
schools = classes in the last sentecne in the above post.
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